How will the solution adjust the compromise space between representatives and senators?

The solution is not limited to reshuffling the cards in the National Assembly. It will also affect, in one way or another, the relations between the two chambers of parliament. When drafting the law, the joint committee is considered a concrete meeting point between the two components of parliament. When the text is discussed in the two chambers, the Prime Minister may decide to convene this body in which seven deputies and seven senators try to reach a consensus text behind closed doors.

The publication in the Official Journal on Friday of the composition of the National Assembly groups offers an opportunity to examine how the political balances in this conciliatory body are evolving. Although the agenda is still empty, this question will be asked in the coming weeks or months. What will be the composition of the seven responsible for negotiating with the representatives of the Senate? How will seven seats be allocated in an Assembly crossed by a tripartite? While the Palais Bourbon is beginning to renew its various bodies, this question is still far from being resolved. “We are in a very ambiguous area,” a National Assembly lawyer explains cautiously.

A distribution that should reproduce the political formation as much as possible.

The regulation provides some elements, In Article 111. It first stipulates that the appointment of deputies to the CMP “seeks to reproduce the political composition” of the National Assembly. Two other conditions are also written in: the group with the largest number of holders shall retain at least one alternate seat and each group must have “at least one holder or alternate seat”. Given the fragmentation of the major political forces and the existence of 11 groups (a record number), distributing 7 full and 7 alternate seats in a completely satisfactory manner, based on controls and a cycle of 577 elected officials, is not easy.

“This clearly raises real questions. The distribution must be the subject of a political agreement in Presidents Conference “If a vote is to decide this point, each group will have a weight in the vote proportional to its number,” a National Assembly official confirms.

In 2022, for example, reduced to a relative majority in the midterm elections, the presidential camp was over-represented in the seven-member body of the CCP. It had four seats out of seven (three for the Ennahdha party and one for the Democratic Group). Three of the incumbents were members of the opposition: a representative of the Republicans, a representative of France Insoumise (LFI), and a representative of the National Rally (RN). For the alternatives, a revolving door system was put in place.

In the current Assembly, the distribution could be a subject of tension. “The new composition of the National Assembly means that this will become a subject. I would not be surprised if the National Assembly Bureau mentioned it,” imagines Jean-Jacques Urvois, former president of the Law Committee from 2012 to 2016. “The Bureau could give the eight committees a form of instructions, which could result from a compromise at the Conference of Presidents. Otherwise, they would be available to everyone and the authenticity would be tested by the commissioners or the texts,” warns the former Minister of Justice, now professor of public law at the University of West Brittany.

In theory, there will be fewer deputies from the presidential camp at future COP meetings.

Depending on a Relative distribution using the highest mean methodIt is possible to imagine what the composition of the COP could look like on the parliamentary side. In this purely mathematical hypothesis, the distribution could work out like this: two deputies from Ennahdha, one from the LFI and one from the Socialist Party, two from the National Rally and one from the LR. It is therefore likely that the former presidential majority would see its share halved, when the National Front would gain an additional place in the Communist Workers' Party, just like the Left.

Including the senators, the balance of power among the honorary members of the COP would be organized as follows: 4 parliamentarians from the Left, 3 parliamentarians from the Renaissance, 1 centrist federal senator, 3 parliamentarians from the Socialist Party, 1 deputy from the Liberal Front and 2 deputies from the National Front. We see that in this hypothetical distribution, it would be necessary to add the 4 senators from the majority from the right and centre, 1 deputy from the Liberal Party and the 3 Renaissance deputies to obtain, on paper, an absolute majority in the joint committee (8 out of 14).

“We will have to see in the coming weeks how things settle down.”

But it is clear that everything will depend on the topics on the table. Professor Jean-Jacques Urvois believes that “everyone will seek to compensate for their numerical fragility in the National Assembly by their presence in the Senate”. “Today, the legislative process is a declared path of the cross. You will have something that can be constantly modified, depending on the topic. The law is supposed to bring security through its foresight”, recalls the constitutionalist.

As for those mainly concerned, few of the Senate group presidents risked commenting on Friday on the possible center of gravity of the few joint committees that could be created in this unprecedented legislature. “It's still a bit early to say,” said Senator Laurent Lafont (UDI), president of the Culture and Education Committee. “Yesterday, we had a signal with the presidency of the Council of the Nation, of a political agreement between the central arch and the left bloc, but it is not enough to create a majority. It may not be enough to move the texts. We will have to see in the coming weeks whether things settle down or not,” he said.

Under the Fifth Republic, mixed commissions were successful most of the time, in seven out of ten cases. For the 2022-2023 session, This success rate rose to 82%.But leaving a CMP with white smoke is not always synonymous with success afterwards, even if this scenario remains relatively rare. Since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, more than fifty compromises have been rejected when the CMP results were read out, Our colleague Pierre Jeanuel recalls 5 years ago for Dalloz NewsThe most famous example remains the Hadobe bill, which was rejected by the National Assembly in 2009.